“Look at me, man!” complains Kenneth Ansu, 29, from Ghana. “You think I like wearing two hats for fun? Three jeans at once? All I could keep was what I could wear. They took everything!” He stands to show me his layers of clothing, including a heavy jacket, blue sweater with nonsense English and three T-shirts. He is in Djerba-Zarzis International Airport in Tunisia, with at least 300 of his countrymen, all young men, all with nothing but uncomfortable and unflattering fashion.

They are part of more than half a million people who have fled the conflict in Libya.

As he headed to the Tunisian-Libyan border, Kenneth was stopped by government soldiers at a checkpoint and ordered to put his bags aside. They strip-searched him and found the meagre savings of $1500 he’d hidden in his shoe. Everything was stolen, except for his clothes, which were thrown back at him. Mobile phones and memory cards were prime targets, as if their confiscation could delete the violence Kenneth was escaping.

But it’s not this treatment or his appearance that humiliates Kenneth the most. It’s the prospect of being shortly flown home to Ghana with absolutely nothing to show for his toil, travels and trouble in Libya. His family are worried and will be happy to see him, “But,” he says, “when my mother sees my pockets are empty, she’ll tell me to go back to Libya and find the nearest moving bullet.”

Kenneth came to Libya three years ago. After the West turned its back on Gaddafi for his sponsorship of terrorism in the 1990s, he adopted a pro-Africa policy and opened his borders. With the ninth largest oil reserves, Libya became a magnet for millions of sub-Saharan Africans in poverty. By 2010 Libya’s official population of six million included one million foreigners, and another million there illegally, including Kenneth.

In his home town of Kumasi, Kenneth was making $50 a month as a driver. Barely enough to live on, let alone save. A friend lent him $500 to cross the Sahara to Libya, a journey of more than 3000 kilometres. He made his own way to Agadez in Niger, an ancient desert crossroads so remote it is often called the beginning of the end of the world.  There, people-smugglers put him in a truck with 200 other hopefuls for the long stretch to the Libyan border.

Breakdowns left him in the sun for days and people simply died around him. In the Hoggar Mountains, by the Algerian-Libyan border, he is sure the driver led them directly into an ambush by Tuareg bandits. With no money for bribes, Kenneth’s friend, Calvin Owusu, 23, was detained by soldiers at the border and forced to work without payment for three weeks until Kenneth was able to send some money back to free him.

“Working without payment” — a nice way of saying “slavery” — is a common theme among the sub-Saharan Africans who made it to Libya. In Tripoli, Kenneth found infrequent work as a plasterer. Gaddafi provided subsidised concrete and building materials to households and construction and renovation became a national sport.

“I thought in Libya, my feet would never touch dirt, only tiles and pavement,” Kenneth says. “I thought the people would be white and that white people were kind. Ha ha ha! What a fool.” He was theoretically paid 1.5 Libyan dinars per hour working inside and 1.75 outside (either way, about $US1.20). The days started at 6am, and while Libyan workers would take shelter during the midday heat, the Africans were expected to keep labouring. But often he would not get paid.

Bakary Coloubi, a diplomat from Mali, told me that many of his citizens were in Libyan jails because employers would make false charges of theft, rather than pay rightful salaries. Or the charges would be true because the employee was trying to take what he was owed.

A Libyan friend once mentioned that he remembers, as a boy, seeing a slave market in Tripoli and that it is still common in Libya to refer to black people as “abid”, meaning “slave” or “servant”. Some legacy of this attitude seems to remain, even, or especially, among the higher up. The day before, Kenneth saw a television report in the airport café showing a Gaddafi press conference. “There was a guy in his entourage and I pointed and shouted ‘He owes me 2500 dinars’. Libyans are bad people. They don’t respect humanity. They let their children throw stones at you and say nothing. They beat you in the market with impunity. They cover their noses when you get on the bus.”

Despite all this, he hoped to stay in Libya, save his money and return home to help his family. But Gaddafi took away even that.

I’ve bought Kenneth a beer in the airport café. Nearby, a middle-aged Belgian s-x tourist weeps into her serviette while her temporary Tunisian boyfriend blankly smokes a cigarette. A plane-load of jolly European sun seekers stream through the arrivals gate. And an endless queue of similarly destitute and unfashionable Africans — Ghanaians, Sudanese, Senegalese —  wait for baguettes and sandwiches from the tireless Tunisian Red Crescent kitchen.

According to the UNHCR, 5000 more refugees are in the Choucha camp down the road (though as a consolation, they have Angelina Jolie listening to their sad stories, rather than me) and more than 2000 more arrive every day. Already the poorest of the poor, abused in the street by children, working like slaves, now robbed of everything by the Gaddafi regime.

“With the strength of God, I will struggle to find a way to Europe. Perhaps save a deposit for a visa and then overstay. But never Libya or the desert,” swears Kenneth Ansu.

*Martin Bendeler is a former adviser to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet on environmental and international policy. He currently consults on trade, security, development and conservation and is managing director of primate conservation charity, Bonobo Conservation Initiative Australia. He was in Tunisia researching the impact of the Jasmine Revolution on transnational crime for Statt Consulting. His blog is Bonobo Road.